Pair of Boots (1000–1125): Art, History and Details

Pair of Boots (1000–1125) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The fabric and tailoring of garments have always defined social status. For these boots, different outer fabrics were used: a patterned silk for the leg portion, and tapestry (kesi) for the foot. Since both were considered luxury fabrics, they were pieced together from remnants too precious to discard. Consequently, the silk pattern was not used in relation to the form of the boot, as seen in some other imperial boots. By contrast, these boots would have been made for a court official, not a member of the imperial family. The patterned silk was woven with geese flanking a vase of flowers on a stand and surrounded by cloud scrolls. The Chinese motif of flowers arranged in a vase was adopted by the Liao during the 11th century and indicates an 11th- or early 12th-century date for the boots.

Object facts

• Title: Pair of Boots
• Date: 1000–1125
• Culture: China, Northern, Liao dynasty (907-1125)
• Type: Garment
• Technique: Silk: compound twill; silk and gold: tapestry; silk: tabby, gauze, batting; leather
• Dimensions: Overall: 34.9 x 25 cm (13 3/4 x 9 13/16 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1992.349

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1992.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38–79.
• Watt, James C. Y, Anne E Wardwell, Anne E Wardwell, Morris Rossabi. When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in cooperation with the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1997.
• Klingbiel, Karen, "Conserving the Past", Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 37 no. 08, October 1997.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.